| ZOO YORK, at Home in the world? |
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| escrito por Fr. Juan Quevedo-Bosch | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Saturday, 23 de May de 2009 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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NO_TRANSLATION_AVAILABLE The Seventh Sunday of Easter, RCL B
Acts
1:15-17, 21-26
for the actual text press here I had been in New York for about two or three years, parenthetically I came from Toronto , one of the most clean cities in the world, and I had to confessed that I was horrified when I rode in the subway for the first time, I thought “what have we done?”. The place, saving the era, could had inspired Dante as good description of hell. I had just finished a wedding; it was of all places on a Circle Line Boat, those that go around Manhattan. The wedding was over, I was dancing with an elderly female rabbi who co-officiated with me. I am leaning against the railing a bit, watching the black waters passing, forming ripples as the boat progresses through the East River at particular time we were passing Astoria Park and I said to myself -I live here, this is my home-. Perhaps for the first time the idea that I “live here” had entered my emotional system, I knew I was not from “here” but somehow my roots have started to grow in this part of God’s world. Then one the guest, joins me at the railing and we start a conversation and she tells me she is from Ohio and other usual inane comments that people say to a minister after a service, and in passing she says “I like to come to New York for a visit, it is a wonderful city, so full of life but I could not live here” to which I responded like a true New Yorker, “nobody is asking you to”. There is no greater truism that New York is a city of immigrants, whether you come from Turkey as Azra and John does, or from New Jersey as Chris Acker does. We all, with different degrees of alienation, we all have experienced and continue experiencing the city. As adaptation is a survival skill, we also slowly, in my personal case stop looking so much at the candy wrappers, the used starbucks coffee cup, the innumerable and almost impregnable dark spots from chewing gum, the litter like a Persian carpet on which we walk day in and day out, and start to see the beauty of the people walking on those streets, incidentally often the same people who turns our city into a dump. So it goes my uneasiness with the statement, “I live here” and “I am not from here”. You can become eventually enamored with the place where you live, but especially more clearly, for immigrants from faraway lands, we never seem to be completely at home. So you find the street littered as well with signs in every language conceivable, creating sometimes completely fantastic hybrids, like the Japanese shushi shop called “Suchitepec”, obviously run by Mexicans, or the Chinese owned and run taco shop on 30th avenue, which sells by the way one of the worst I ever had.
6”I have made your name known to those whom you
gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have
kept your word. 7Now they know that everything you have given me is from you;
8for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received
them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you
sent me. 9I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world,
but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. 10All mine are
yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them. The cracks on identities not only runs through the city physical plant but also through, and specially poignantly so, through family. You have the Mexican kid, sidekick wielding and/or ipod connected, swaying his straight beautiful dye blond hair. Our own Chris Acker, a graphic designer, aptly has renamed the city Zoo York, since truly so many interesting bipeds have made their home here. If there is one place where we can truly feel that the very passionate prayer of Jesus to the Father that we have heard today is here in Zoo York, here in Astoria, here at Redeemer. Because I will contend that many of us have know that we live here, but we are not from here. We love the place, and defend it from snubbing “out-of-townies”, we may not love it as not to trashed it but we love it nevertheless, yet at the same time, we feel that we do not truly are from here. This kind of existential and uncomfortable threshold is what Jesus anticipates for his church, for his disciples for eternity. This is the last prayer of Jesus before returning to the Father, in an event of the biblical story that puts us at irreconcilable odds with deists, empiricists, scientists, skeptics, namely the bodily Ascension of Jesus. I have said that adaptation is a survival skill and frequently the church living in a world dominated by these forces I just mentioned, focus intensely in the Incarnation, in the horizontal dimensions of Jesus’ ministry. Jesus then becomes an ethical master, social activist, advocate of the poor. Contemporary Christian leaders from the broadly defined “liberal” tradition had argued against the virgin birth that precedes the Incarnation as sequence, as to make the event Jesus in its incarnational side more palatable to contemporary audiences. However, the farewell prayer we are dealing with today, it puts Jesus in a stark contrast to the church contemporary hyper-focus on the incarnation and restores the balance to the cosmic dimension of the event Jesus. In a way, Jesus recuperates his last name: The Christ, the Messiah of the world to come, a world that is already here but at the same time has not yet come. It puts Jesus, out the slavery to the factual and historical, the here and the now, out of Palestine, first century Judaism and Roman Empire and frees Him to the sphere of the possible, the tomorrow and beyond, the mythical, the utopia –literally –the no place-. It puts him within the reach of the Universe as a whole created reality and beyond it. It is not that “the-here-and-now” are of no importance, but rather than both the incarnation and the ascension are the two entry and exit points of the event Jesus, and as such both entry and exit, presuppose another dimension where they take place.
Or as Teilhard de Chardin, priest and scientist put it: First, we are aware of being contained in a
World whose two halves (the physical and the mystical) are slowly closing in
with planetary force upon a Mankind that is born of their approach to one
another. And then we realize that we are moving into a hyper-milieu of Life,
produced by the coincidence of an emergent Christ and a convergent Universe. It is precisely our dual condition of being physical and mystical that creates this ontological, this design flaw in you wish of our existence, because born of one, physical halve, we move with planetary force to the other, the mystical halve. Like the immigrants in the city, we know that we live here, but are not really from here. Our divine “stuff” is made of heaven; our lives are made of “dust”. We are part of what Theilard has called the “amorization of the universe”. There is nothing to embarrass ourselves in the Ascension of Jesus, yes it does not conform to scientific thought, yes it may bring social ridicule, but we know that already. However, it is the ascended Christ that allows me to face tomorrow. It is the Christ sitting at the metaphoric right hand of the Father, interceding for us orphans that empower me to deal with the world as it is, with its wickedness, its violence and its death. Jesus does not ask the Father to shields us from this three prong attack of the world as it is, rather He prays to the Father that we in spite of the world as it is, never forget that although living here, we are from away. Jesus prays that our relationship, our fellowship, our living in each other, that through Him goes all the way to the Father’s bosoms may not be lost while we are embattled by the world as it is, by the Evil One. Jesus prays to the Father that his church, those who claim His name, continue unceasingly in the work of the amorization of the world. If we do not feel at home, if we do not feel completely welcome, if we have this strange uneasiness that comes from being from away, if we know that we as disciples of the One who created all things are homeless until we find shelter, embrace and plentiful love in Him, then it means that the Father have heard the Son pray.
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